Amazon’s pet play: Tech giant unveils in-house dog food brand Wag

Amazon this week debuted its in-house dog food brand Wag. A web page for the product offers a variety of dry dog foods and promises that more pet supplies will be added over time.

Wag dog food is only available for Amazon Prime members and will put pressure on a host of competitors, including grocery stores and pet stores. As noted by Bloomberg, pet food is a difficult item to ship because of how heavy it is, so it requires a strong logistics operations like Amazon’s.

The Wag name dates back to Amazon’s $545 million acquisition of Quidsi, parent company to sites like Diapers.com as well as pet supply site Wag.com. Amazon shut down the Quidsi unit last year because the tech giant couldn’t get it to make money.

Market research firm Packaged Facts estimated that U.S. pet owners spent more than $26 billion in 2017, a 6 percent increase over the previous year. But that is just a small piece of the pie, with pet supplies in general projected to be a $96 billion market by 2020. That’s why Amazon has promised to add more pet products over time.